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Parz writes "Mods have been an important part of gaming for well over 15 years. Not only have they provided plenty of additional free gaming to players, but they've acted as a launch pad for independent and amateur programmers to show off their skills to potential employers. This Gameplayer article highlights the programmers who are doing it best, and what mods have made biggest and most enjoyable impact on gaming. The article not only provides details for each game, but also links to the downloads, and is a great resource for those interesting in getting up-to-date with this exciting scene."
Obviously, this list will seem incomplete to anyone whose favorite mod was omitted. What mods contributed most to your enjoyment?

That's exactly what I thought. I got part way into the article when they started talking about the Stargate mod for Cyrsis that is nowhere near a playable form and i started losing interest.

I'm as big a fan of the SG universe as the next guy, but I really thought the article was going to be about the great mods that are out there right now - the article doesn't even touch on counterstrike, team fortress or the counterstrike-a-like Urban Terror - all classic mods with gameplay to spare! I'd have thought that

They did at least give Counter-Strike a passing mention, but the lack of Team Fortress, and even moreso the lack of Threewave CTF seem like major ommissions.
Also, that site seems to be optimized for getting as many pageviews as possible. There's no reason that article needed to be split up into 12 slow-loading banner-loaded pages.

I'm pretty sure this list is about mods that are still mods, and have not evolved to stand-alone games. I've never played Ricochet, but both Counter-Strike and Team Fortress are now full-fledged retail games and therefore no longer qualify as mods.

For all those who own WC3 and don't know how to find games, log onto Battle.net then click on "Custom Games".
When you join a game, you will download the map which contains all the models/graphics/sounds/game logic for a given mod.
Tower Defense++
I would also recommend http://btanks.net/v2/ [btanks.net]

were Starship Trooper maps for SCand the intensly complex maps people would make for WC3. I haven't played in years, but it was so much fun! People did really neet things like wagon races, and Peon fights!

TWCTF [twctf.org] for the original Quake is probably the best mod of all time. Not Counterstrike, or Team Fortress (lol sorry). Not only because the inventor of the Geek Code Block [geekcode.com] had something to do with it. KTHXBYE!

I'd have to put in my vote for Discovery mod [discoveryfl.com] for Freelancer. Not only does it add great features to multiplay,but it really makes the original single player game shine. If you have ever played the original Freelance,you know that battles often are a turkey shoot,either you die instantly or they do. With Discovery the battles from the very start are challenging,because the AI IMHO acts more like playing a real player. They really give you a good fight. And there are so many new things to see and do in Discovery I don't even know where to start. Really a great example IMHO of a great mod.

And this article is a good example of why I still prefer PC gaming. Thanks to modders after a game is beaten often you can go online and find so many new things to try and do with your game that IMHO it really adds value to the games that allow modding.

I played the original (not source) counter strike for countless hours! The source version was faithful to the original, almost exactly the same but with a couple of new guns and physics like ragdoll bodies and barrels moving with explosions! Fast frantic team based strategy shooter. Great.

Not only was it the most popular mod for Half-life, but also Half-life 2. In my opinion, this is THE definitive mod that has been recognized as a game of its own. There were actually mods of CS itself. And they forgot CS from this list?

Counter-Strike is a case in point; a mod that turned the alien infested Half-Life into a detailed tactical shooter. It became so damned popular it overshadowed the original game engine it was built on, like the student outshining the teacher. Counter-Strike - like other big names in the modding world - only served to fan the flames.

It is indeed, and then after that build up, it isn't mentioned in the list of "best mods". You may infer that it is included given this paragraph, but it technically isn't in the list they posted. Instead, they feature a mod that hasn't even been finished yet and "looks great, even if it [might] play like crap".

It's sorta funny - I was digging through some old CDs recently and found I've still got that one... but for the life of me I don't know where the actual Doom installation disk (floppies? A CD? I don't remember) is anymore.

Wolfenstein! It was called "Barneystein" and changed the final boss of the first episode into Barney (who "shot" musical notes at you while playing the "I Love You" song). It also changed the default soldiers into Butt-Head and the machine gun soldiers into Beavis, (from the Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon on MTV)

not even a mention of one of the original FPS mods. I am talking about Team Fortress for Quake. I think, (and people can/will correct me if I am wrong), that it was one of if not the first mod out there.

I agree. The lack of Team Fortress for Quake makes me feel like the article is full of fail. I'm not sure if it was the first mod (I seem to remember some Star Wars graphic mods for Warcraft 1), but I do think it was the first extremely popular mod. It was absolutely amazing.

Team Fortress was an early mod, but it came after Three Wave CTF which added the whole concept of Capture the Flag as a game type to the FPS dictionary, and was probably the most-played mod at least in the pre-Quakeworld era. TF owes a lot to the existence of TWCTF, though on the other hand TWCTF was a partial mod and TF was a "full conversion" mod, maybe the first truly popular one. Mentioning at least one of these would seem appropriate.

My favourite part of Threewave was the runes you could pick up that acted as either health regen, damage mod, run speed and I think the last one was.... umm.. I forget, but they were awesome.

The powerups that appeared in Team Arena later on must have come from those original threewave runes. I liked them much more than the TA versions, since in TW you could throw away a rune and pick up another one to change roles. In Team Arena you had to die to lose your current powerup.

The OOO mod for Oblivion made it a FAR better game than the original Oblivion. As for modding others I've played various ones since the original TF. However games designed with modding in mind take the proverbial cake. Oblivion, Morrowind, The Quake series to some extent. These folks all provided tools for the user to crack open their stuff and get at it and even patched some games to make the mods work better "desert combat comes to mind for Battlefield 1942"
Sims2 and Sims1 comes to mind for user created

Way back in the annals of gaming history - the early nineties to be precise - an incredibly important game was released on the PC. That game was iD Software's now permanently immortalised Doom. We don't have to tell you about it, you already know, but depending on just how old you are and just how much you tinker with your games you might not realise Doom possessed one of the first heavily modded game engines.

By the time Doom was released people had already dabbled in modding on earlier games like Wolfenstien 3D and A Bard's Tale with such fervour that iD co-founder Tom Hall made one of his early goals with Doom to allow user created content to be designed with as much ease as possible. At release users could alter the graphics, levels, sounds and even core design of Doom by taking to its internal 'WAD' file format with an array of MS-DOS based tools creating new, funny and downright stupid content for the 'father-figure' FPS game. Enterprising folk created new maps, new themes or even comedic endeavours like 'Mock 2: The Speed of Stupid' - a bundle of Doom maps whose designs were intentionally bizarre, boring or downright freaky.

From early forays like this an unspoken partnership was born between developers and end users that has exploded into a fiery dynamic world of user created content that takes the games we know and love, and makes them better. Counter-Strike is a case in point; a mod that turned the alien infested Half-Life into a detailed tactical shooter. It became so damned popular it overshadowed the original game engine it was built on, like the student outshining the teacher. Counter-Strike - like other big names in the modding world - only served to fan the flames.

The advantages of modding are easily spotted; the consumer gets to purchase a new game that once conquered, can be re-played in a new setting with new content or environments, while old games have their shelf life extended considerably through modding teams pushing the engine further with their own imagination and ingenuity. For the developer, the trade-off of spending time bundling good tools to expose the inner workings of its games for the modding community begets better sales of the title thanks to the attractiveness of the extra content available. And happily nestled in the middle of all this are the modders themselves, who get unprecedented exposure online to sell their own skills by building on the foundations of commercially released games.

Developers now look to the modding community for fresh talent to scoop up into professional roles and some of the best in the business have risen through the ranks from a starting point of game mods. The one downside of this gigantic orgy of creativity and content is the admittedly haphazard quality. With a few freeware tools and a decent game engine any nut and their army of trained monkeys can create and release a mod onto the market, resulting in the good stuff hidden amongst great wads of less than shining work.

That's where we come in. Gameplayer has scoured the length and breadth of the internet to find you some of the most promising game mods for some of the best games, and we're going to take you through each one. Some are new, some are old, some are finished while others are still very much a work-in-progress, but each one is well worth a look if you're on the hunt to get the most out of your games. Read on, and have your browser ready to do some serious downloading but just remember - the modding scene is big, huge in fact, so what we're showing here is just a drop in the ocean.

First Person Shooter Mods

BFWoWMod (Battlefield 2)Complete and utter insanity often breeds excellent results, and there's no denying whoever thought up the concept of combining Blizzard's rich fantasy World of Warcraft setting with the anti-tank tomfoolery of EA's Battlefield 2 was a few elves short of an enchanted forest. The mod is an almost complete conversion of the graphics, sounds and playable classes of Battlefield 2, allowing WoW fans to take up the mantle of

Thanks a ton for posting the textual content of the article. Before even reading / searching through it, I somehow knew in my heart that not a single racing simulation related mod would be mentioned.

No GPLEA (the folks who continue to breathe new life into "Grand Prix Legends" on an annual basis, a sim that is over a decade old), no mention of rfactor (a racing sim essentially designed to allow easy modding by the community which right now has over 500 mods and tracks, on separate counts available), heck no

The whole article is full of fail; half the listed mods haven't even been released yet.

But yeah, VTM: Bloodlines is pretty goddamn fantastic, and the Unofficial Patch makes it playable, though there's been some breakage in recent versions. It's unique (somehow, the vampire theme is rare in RPG format), creepy, funny, at times very scary, and just extraordinarily well-written, with a dark, gritty, very real atmosphere throughout. And I say this as someone who usually has little patience for epic stories in RPGs. Give me an engaging setting and I'll pay attention to your story.

Unfortunately, Bloodlines stops being fun about 2/3 of the way through the game. Starting with the sewers and continuing through the end game, it turns a fantastic, deep RPG into an unremarkable FPS. It's as if they suddenly fired all their writers and designers, and got some level designers well-versed in recycled FPS cliches to build the rest of the game.

I know there is some kind of page click metric that people get paid on, but honestly, would it hurt to put a list on the first page so I don't have to try to click through a site that is probably already getting hammered.

I buy software. I don't abide most of the bullshit copy protection, though. I didn't carry a CD player in my laptop, I don't like the battery drain, and I don't like having to have the disk with me. NoCD patches made such games tolerable.

It states:
"This Gameplayer article highlights the programmers who are doing it best, and what mods have made biggest and most enjoyable impact on gaming."

The biggest impact on gaming when, in the last 6 months? Seriously most of those mods can't even begin to call themselves the best when compared to some of the originals done in Quake, Quake 2, Half-Life, etc.

The article has 10 pages, each carries 5 banners.Let's assume they are paid a very conservative $.50 USD per one thousand unique visitors for each of these banners.Let's further assume slashdot drove 2 million unique's to the article.Let's further assume those people, on average, clicked through 3 pages before they realized there is nothing to see.

That's a solid $15000 USD, under fairly pessimisic assumptions. They probably made closer to $30000 by the time you are reading this.

The list only covered mods for current games and games that are hardly old. There was no mention of Counter-Strike, the mod that exploded and practically brought millions of gamers back to half-life. There was no mention of mods for games like Diablo or Diablo II. It mentioned Doom, but didn't explore any of the fantastic mods that arose. Not even similar games like Hexen or Duke Nukem. Lame list. Period.

The reviewer is obviously too young or too obsessed with the present state of modding, since not even one of the many dozens of mods and thousands of units created by fans for Total Annihilation was mentioned. It's still being actively modded now, even though the game is over ten years old and has more recent "sequels".

Total Annihilation is very likely the most heavily modded game of all time, and it wasn't even mentioned? Pffft.

I'm glad you mentioned it, because there is even a complete engine that was created to run Total Annihilation in fully rendered 3D, called Spring [clan-sy.com]. It has since surpassed its main goals and has become something even bigger, with many more games that have been developed (or currently being developed) including WWII based, Gundam, Star Wars, and even games based on the internal systems and parts of a computer (Kernel Panic).

It has been the only source of entertainment (besides occasional bouts of fallout) t

Preachin' to the choir! (I never cared for the in-game TA-Spring UI, FWIW, but I certainly know all about it, unlike the oblivious reviewer.) I did rather minor modding of TA myself right up until this year. My favorite pastime had to be inventing bizarre new "mutators" to use with TA:Mutation.;-)

First game I ever modded was QBasic Gorillas. I found the variable that determined the blast radius of the bananas and increased it to ridiculous amounts, discovered that the game used colour-checking to do collision detection and gave the gorillas armoured helmets, found the palette entries and made the gorillas green, and composed my own song for the intro. That game was quite possibly the only good piece of software Microsoft ever produced.

For me Quake had some of the best mods ever. For Quake I there was Future vs. Fantasy, a great mod where you could play as different characters either from the future, or from the fantasy realm.

Quake II had a great one called Action Quake, which is somewhat similar in playing-style to counterstrike. But it had nice things like if you got hit in the leg, you'd bleed, and have trouble walking, until you applied a bandage. Thery were so much fun at the time!

They stayed a lot in my mind, though lately all I've been playing is DotA...:-)

It's clear that this list is a list of recent popular mods, rather than a list of the most successful and influential mods of all time, since pretty much every game listed is a rather current game, and that the submitter clearly didn't even read his own submitted article.

It even says it in the article itself:

Gameplayer has scoured the length and breadth of the internet to find you some of the most promising game mods for some of the best games, and weâ(TM)re going to take you through each one. Some are new, some are old, some are finished while others are still very much a work-in-progress

Leaving off mods like Counter Strike (hello, most played FPS ever), DotA (played more than vanilla War3), Team Fortress and Enemy Territory (both have real-game sequels), and TWCTF (which introduced CTF to FPSes) completely disqualifies it from being a serious list of the most influential mods of all time. I mean, the first mod listed, "BFWoWMod" for BF2, is still in beta.

This is akin to listing the "Most influential programmers of all time" and excluding Don Knuth while listing "that kid down the street that likes computers."

The article itself isn't half bad once you realize that it's the "Current Best Mods Available" and not "The Best Mods of All Time."

Actually, it's worse than that. I made the mistake of reading the whole article. Several of the mods are completely unreleased. Several are clearly poor examples of vibrant modding communities. One of them is scarcely more than a *cheat* *mod* for an RTS of little note.

This list is an utter failure and completely fails to represent many of the brilliant and creative mods out there now, let alone recognize the influence of mods on the history of game development.

I have no problem with the author. He has his opinion and is entitled to post it as he pleases, but this is pathetic content to bring to the attention of the entire Slashdotting world.

I mean, really, Hidden? That mod is a joke. It's not fun, period. I'd rather play Source Forts, which isn't very fun once you get past the whole "oh I can build forts" aspect of it. Hell, I'd rather play the campfest that's Insurgency, which is loathesome to say the least. Eternal Silence would have been a better pick. And all I've done so far is list other mods I can't stand to play anymore for various different reasons.

Seriously, people who write these types of articles don't play a lot of mods, and that'

1. Action Quake 2 - This mod inspired the game mechanics of Counterstrike, counterstrike used to be a community based mod, and was heavily influenced by action quake2 which put real life "feal" to dieing. IE you could die in a few hits and had to hide etc... TF would have been first except that action quake 2 spawned counterstrike.

2. Team Fortress

The mother of mods to prove that total conversion mods could take a mass amount of players from the core game. As me

The article is loaded with phrases like 'our research indicates' and half the mods aren't even released. How can you decide what the best mods are if you've not even played them?
Having ALFA (A Land Far Away) listed is amusing considering it was the laughing stock of the NWN community for years and despite its 'ambition' never did anything dozens of other persistent worlds hadn't already done.

hi guys,
I just wanted to say that the original title was Mods that Matter in 2008. It just seems like a lot of the comments are specifically reacting to the work 'successful' which was not added by me in the submission and is a bit misleading.
Also to the person who copy and pasted the whole article. That is a pretty big breach of copyright, you shoud probably remove it.

ALFA for NWN was a great idea - a set of persistent world servers making up the Forgotten Realms.

The implementation was crap. The servers were colossally laggy. The scripting was often horrible. The servers were frequently nice to look at but shockingly devoid of content, especially - thanks to that bad scripting - reasonably dynamic content.

Right here on slashdot you'll find comments from Adam Miller [slashdot.org], who produced the best content [ign.com] for NWN and NWN2 -- Dreamcatcher, Dark Waters, Lute Hero. ALFA can't even ho

A mod for Unreal Tournament is what drove me to buy my first "gaming" rig. When I saw Infiltration being played and my friend explained it was made by other players using the unreal editor something resonated and I have been a mod fan ever since. Sadly, the unreal franchise has lost its credibility for supporting mods despite the success mods brought them Same with EA and the Battlefield series. A great mod revived the franchise yet they cripple real modders now from being able to do inventive, creative

BF1942- DesertCombat and Eve of Destruction. I played with Action Battlefield and it was funny as hell doing jeep jumps and inverted bridge jumps.

Q2- Rocket Arena! Very competitive mod that was popular with gaming ladders.

RTCW (Return to Castle Wolfenstien) No mods there, unless the admin is on and decides to zero out the gravity, yeesh!One server stands out from the other RTCW servers - Happy Penguin RTCW. They run only one map (Depot) and that's it, unless the admin is at console, then he'll switch it to

It probably doesn't belong in a top 10 list (as others have mentioned, CS, Team Fortress, etc are more likely candidates), but my friends and I really love Mr. Pant's Excessive Overkill for Quake III, Elite Force, and all the Unreal Tournament games. The feature sets vary slightly from game to game, but the premise is always the same: Make every gun fire ridiculously fast and have everything explode. Rapid fire rocket launcher? Sure. Dual-wielding chain guns with explosive bullets? Why not? A sniper

In my mind there are mods, and then there are total conversions. Mods alter aspects of the original game. A great example of this is Dawn of War. It's a really good RTS, but given the wealth of lore it was inevitable that the game would have to omit or modify a lot of material. The game also has strong mod support, and the number of mods designed to bring the game closer to lore, add more units, and so on is just absurd. On the other hand, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are frequently host to total conversions, where people pretty much make their own games and just borrow the engine and some textures. I got Half-Life 1 for Christmas the year it was released. I really didn't feel the need to buy a new shooter for years after that thanks to the variety of mods available.

The common thread in both of the games I mentioned? They both released mod tools. In Dawn of War's case, there was even a menu in the game where you could choose which mod to start. I'm sure this has paid off for the developers. In Valve's case, they even hired some of the mod teams. I'm sure Counter-Strike alone kept Half-Life 1 selling years after it should have been forgotten. I know my family owned a second copy so my brother and I could play online together, something I don't think I'd bother with for the majority of the games I play.

Seriously, how can this be called "The Best Game Mods"? As much as I hate it, Counter-Strike has to be one of the biggest and widely played mods (and now standalone game) of all time, and it doesn't even get a mention???

I could list countless other mods over the past 10+ years that make a lot of the vaporware in that article look like some 14 year-old kid just heard about modding and started making some screenshots.

Some of the big mods that should/could have been on that list if I were to write it:

Counterstrike (pre-source), or CS, was the first community-driven mod that turned into a huge commercial success. Based on the original HalfLife 1 engine, the now classic war between Terrorists and Counter Terrorists ran smoothly on even an old 300 MHz Celeron with a 3DFX graphics card. In a way CS is "the mother of all 3D mods" (that is to say: the first serious mod for a 3D FPS). Read more on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

Day of Defeay (pre-source), or DOD, was very much like CS but was the first mod to b

And if you wish to take that route, then the many maps in Starcraft were the original "mods". Warcraft 3 just took most of Starcraft and made it 3D with a "hero" system. Guess that's why I never really enjoyed WC3, but loved Starcraft to death (SC2 and its now many 'expansions')

I beg to differ. Mod has nothing to do with the scale of the project or how it is implemented.

Nevertheless it is lame this didn't mention DOTA, or counter strike. I mean seriously, I may personally despise those things, but what the feck? This list is so full of things I have never heard before of...

And what about freaking TNT? Yes, that once ago the game's company ended up buying a modding team so they can distribute the mod for money as a new version of the game, I can't conceive a list without that...

There's also Giants: Citizen Kabuto [wikipedia.org] , which is exactly that: an action-RTS game, with an interesting story and a GREAT sense of humor! If you missed it, you can pick it up for $6.00 from Good Old Games [gog.com].

That was one of the best games I played during it's time. The story was awesome, the Multiplayer was fun. Multiplayer felt like tribes / tf / giants all scrambled together, and the single player had some of the best lines.

Including an old character who says he can't do something cause his balls are saggy!

Everyone hated the hackers, and so did I when they ruined non-hacking games, but it was really amazing to see the kinds of stuff they could do. When it was hacker against hacker, you'd see the extent of their bag of tricks: measures, counter-measures, counter-counter-...-measures, never before seen tricks, etc.

Basic example: You had people that could "fade" which required setting a flag on an opponent's character to make the game think they were falling to their de